Thirty-One—Men Who Come
Getting dressed takes longer than you’d think. Not because he’s reluctant exactly, though there’s something of that. More because the clothes go on differently than they came off.
He’s not armouring up the way he arrived. He’s just getting dressed, the way you do in your own bedroom, without an audience in his head watching him do it.
We talk while it happens. About nothing in particular, about everything that came up, about something he’s just thought of that he wants to say before he goes. There’s always something. The conversation that opened up this afternoon doesn’t close just because the session does. It goes home with him, sits with him, surfaces at odd moments during the week.
He’ll think of a question he forgot to ask. He’ll notice something about his body he hasn’t noticed before. He’ll find himself standing differently in the bathroom mirror, or in the gym, or just going about his day.
That’s why this isn’t a single afternoon.
One session like this could be mistaken for a service—something purchased, consumed, complete in itself. That’s not what it is. What it is, is the beginning of a man getting more comfortable inside his own skin, and that’s not a process that concludes neatly at the door. He’ll come back.
Not because something is wrong or because he needs fixing but because this is now part of how he thinks about himself—as a man with a body that deserves some uncomplicated attention now and then. As a man who has somewhere he can ask the real questions. As a man who gets to laugh and move and be touched and be seen without it costing him anything he isn’t willing to give.
What builds over time is harder to name than what happens in a single afternoon. A kind of ease. A lower baseline of shame. The questions get asked sooner because he knows now they can be asked. The body stops being something to manage and starts being something to inhabit.
He might start noticing other men differently—not sexually necessarily, but with more generosity, more recognition. He’s probably carrying something too.
Most men are.
I’m not easing him toward anything in particular. Not a new identity, not a revelation, not a better version of himself according to someone else’s specification.
Just easing his mind. About his body, about his desires, about the thoughts that loop, about the fact of being a man in a body in a world that has never quite given him permission to be both fully and without apology.
That’s all. That’s enough.
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